DANZIG BALDAEV: TATTOO COLLECTOR

“Between 1948 and 1986, during his career as a prison guard, Danzig Baldaev made over 3,000 drawings of tattoos. They were his gateway into a secret world in which he acted as ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and provocative, reflecting as they do the lives, status and traditions of the convicts that wore them. Baldaev made comprehensive notes about each tattoo, which he then carefully reproduced in his tiny St. Petersburg flat. The resulting exquisitely detailed ink drawings are accompanied with his handwritten notes and signature on the reverse, the paper is yellowed with age, and carries Baldaev’s stamp, giving the drawings a visceral temporality – almost like skin.” ~ Fuel Deisgn

The acronym ‘MIR’ spells the word for ‘peace’ in Russian and stands for ‘Shooting will reform me’.

‘This is what is destroying us!’

This tattoo is widespread in criminal circles. There are several versions, with and without text.

Intricate tattoo from a convict imprisoned ‘because of a woman’.

Translation: ‘Take out bitches, stool-pigeons and traitors!’ The acronym ‘MIR’ spells the word for peace and stands for ‘Shooting will reform me’.

A ‘warrior’s grin’.

‘I love smoking men’s cigarettes’

A youth tattoo known as ‘The Smoker’. Made in a women’s corrective labour camp in Novozybkov, Bryansk Region in 1990.